During the second week of July we spent time with Rabbi Weis.  Rabbi Weis came up to Alaska from New York.  He works for OK Kosher and performed an audit on our plant.  The audit entailed the Rabbi and I thoroughly going through the process of catching salmon, processing salmon, and finally to packaging the salmon.  For us it was a simple process.  We catch salmon, halibut and flounder and we only process these fish.  Once the season is done we shut the plant down for the winter.  So out of 12 months the plant is only operational for 2 months.  During those 2 months only kosher fish come into our plant. 

To view a list of our certified products click here:

http://www.rjseafoods.com/images/display_custom_kc_pdf.pdf

Nate

This summer went by rather quickly.  We began fishing on our set net sites at the end of June.  Our salmon season ended the second week of August.  This year we fished 14 out of the 15 nets that we have.  We lost an anchor on one of the nets and we were not able to find or replace the anchor in time.

It was a bad year for our set net sites.  We only caught about half of what we would normally catch.  This was after an expected 36% increase in the size of the run (according to Alaska Fish and Game  http://www.cf.adfg.state.ak.us/geninfo/pubs/pubshome.php).  The fish we did catch were nice in color and size.

We did have a great crew on our set net sites and in our plant processing.  They all worked hard and got along well.  We had college students from Minnesota, Washington and Turkey.  We look forward to seeing some of them return next year.

We have the plant cleaned and shut down for winter.  We are getting settled in before the snow and cold temperatures come.

Nate